China to reform, to transform
On Aug. 4 the Singapore-based LienHe Zaobao published Dr.I. Wibowo's presentation on China's "capitalist class within the communist party" in a seminar at the East Asia Institute. He was quoted as saying that "following China's rapid economic development, the communist party has to face the emergence of private entrepreneurs or the capitalist class, and that President Jiang Zemin's theory of the three representation is for him to leave behind a personal "historical heritage" and to make the party more stable and stronger."
President Jiang Zemin's theory is that the party should represent 1) advanced productive forces 2) advanced Chinese cultures and 3) the fundamental interests of the majority.
I would like to question Dr.I.Wibowo's intellectual honesty, academic consistency and his logical coherence. At one time, he wrote that China was a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian regime, and another time he wrote that China liked to copy everything American, especially since the time of former president Reagan, and that its reform had impoverished its peasants and made its urban workers redundant on small payments.
And now he suggests that China's economy developed rapidly. May I say that where Dr. Wibowo stands depends on where he sits.
As for President Jiang's theory, Marxism states that material forces determine the relations of production, which in turn determine the legal and political superstructure of society and its form of consciousness -- religion, philosophy and so on.
Now as the modes and relations of production in China have changed and advanced, so would its "superstructure".
As much as Marxism had transformed China, China would have also transformed Marxism, as Mao Tze Tung had done to expand the theory of the proletariat to include rural peasants. The former late U.S. president Richard Nixon quoted Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew in his book Leaders, that "China always absorbs and eventually destroys foreign influences."
In the decades to come, China will not be a land of communism, although communism also exists in other forms, such as in the Jewish state's Kibbutz system, without Marxism; but China will be a socialist country marked by its Confucianism, humanity, rationality, meritocracy and its Taoism for its romanticism.
China will further reform and transform and will perhaps help transform the world too, but not as a super crude power.
SIA KA-MOU
Jakarta